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Ian Lamont writes "The City of Boston has reached a $170,000 settlement with Simon Glik, who was arrested by Boston Police in 2007 after using his mobile phone to record police arresting another man on Boston Common. Police claimed that Glik had violated state wiretapping laws, but later dropped the charges and admitted the officers were wrong to arrest him. Glik had brought a lawsuit against the city (aided by the ACLU) because he claimed his civil rights were violated. According to today's ACLU statement: 'As part of the settlement, Glik agreed to withdraw his appeal to the Community Ombudsman Oversight Panel. He had complained about the Internal Affairs Division's investigation of his complaint and the way they treated him. IAD officers made fun of Glik for filing the complaint, telling him his only remedy was filing a civil lawsuit. After the City spent years in court defending the officers' arrest of Glik as constitutional and reasonable, IAD reversed course after the First Circuit ruling and disciplined two of the officers for using "unreasonable judgment" in arresting Glik.'"

...that a precedent had been set in by court instead of by settlement. When one party (in this case, the government) is forced by the court to do something, it tends to have more legal weight behind it than when the party instead voluntarily takes an action.

But the price was not high enough for every officer on the line to get the message. They pay more for your average car crash involving a city vehicle.

Add three more zeros to the end of that number and this practice of arresting photographers ceases everywhere in the country overnight.

How about firing everyone up the chain of command who supported them.Taxpayers pay for those fines, but taking away their jobs and pensions is more appropriate - after all when the police abuse their powers it generally ruins the lives of the people they do it. Turn about is fair play.

Now if they made the officer pay at least half of $170,000, and then take the rest from the entire police officer's pension plan instead of the tax payer, then you'll see these type of evil, cowardly arrests stop overnight. Nothing like sharing the pain to stop this...

Do you support arresting everyone then? After all, they could all be planning to commit a crime in the next few minutes.

There are rules about what the police can and can't do. Just like for everyone else. If they break those rules, they should be punished for it. If they thought the law allowed them to detain a person, but it actually didn't, then they should be treated the same as everyone else : Ignorance of the law is no defense. They should of course be offered a plea bargain, where they get reduced sentences if they testify against the person who gave them the order to arrest people taping them. And that person should be charged with conspiracy at least.

"Do you believe that before anyone seeks justice he should perform an economic analysis?"If I cannot afford lawyers then yes, I have no choice.If i cannot afford the years of legal battle needed to win against a vastly better funded opponent then yes.It's not how it should work, but it is how it does work.

Yeah, but it's a shame that they agreed not to continue against the IAD. Individual police officers breaking the law isn't a huge threat to society if they are held accountable for it. However, when the IAD, whose entire job is to keep the cops in line, refuses to take legitimate complaints against the police, and the DA turns around and presses charges against anyone who does complain, that is when you know you have big problems. It shows the system is corrupt to the core, not the result of a few bad apple

I just wish.....that a precedent had been set in by court instead of by settlement

Yes! I also wish to know which one will be chosen here: "The two officers,... , face discipline ranging from an oral reprimand to suspension, a department spokeswoman said yesterday."
Why do I think it will be a lot closer to the former?

That is kind of what I was thinking. The officers got off very easy, they probably should have been fired. The IAD officers should be disciplined as well for their poor handling of the case. Even if the arresting officer didn't know (which is no excuse) that what Gilk was doing was legal, IAD certainly should have.

According to the article, the City of Boston had a policy allowing officers to arrest people in those circumstances. No one will get fired for following this type of policy. I'm thinking the punishment will be an informal finger wag.

I'm just glad this suit went the right way. Cam-coders in every cell phone will have a major impact on both crime and enforcement in the future. People are getting filmed while robbing or committing other crimes right and left, which is a very good thing, and a major disincentive to commit major crimes. Note that no one is trying to make us to stop recording crimes in progress, unless it's policemen committing them. The impact this has on enforcement should be equally positive, creating a major disincentive for the police to act above the law. If this had gone the other way, it would have been a blow to freedom from government oppression.

According to the article, the City of Boston had a policy allowing officers to arrest people in those circumstances. No one will get fired for following this type of policy. I'm thinking the punishment will be an informal finger wag.

Yes they where just following orders... I wonder what other orders they follow?

Who cares what some bureaucrat wrote in some city policy? If what Glik, and people like him, were doing was not, in fact, against the law; then the cops were 100% out of line in even speaking to him, much less arresting him. And they should be facing catastrophic civil and even criminal penalties of their own.

Because they have an organized and heavily-armed domestic para-military force (which the Federal government has been encouraging the creation & use of, and providing local PDs grants and other funding mechanisms to create) with which they respond with overwhelming and deadly force to any perceived resistance from any common citizen, but are almost never employed in the rare arrests of politicians, the super-rich, and others in equally "elite" positions.

How is making up false offenses and arresting people not kidnapping? Why are the cops not tried for kidnapping? (Yes, yes, I know, who should arrest them, who should file the charges, but it would be nice to live in a slightly fairer world.)

Seriously oral reprimand? Something like "hey dumbass you just cost us two years of your wages". The sad think is it is the public's money that is going to be used to pay this. So you pay for a police officer, he pisses on a citizens rights then you tax the public some more to pay off for the damage you did. Nice.

The precident is that police don't know the first fucking thing about the Constitution or your civil rights. Police can and will do whatever the fuck they want and your only recourse is to try and file a complaint about it after the fact (in the meantime, shut up and do what you're told by the officer).

The average cops attitude reminds me of the Roman consul Gnaeus Pompey, who conquered Syria and Jerusalem without the senates prior approval. When some of his victims complained that his actions were unjust, he responded "Stop quoting the laws to us, we carry swords."

Did it even invalidate similar laws in THAT state? It sounds to me (IANAL) that they just said "Alright, we messed up this time." Not "Alright, it's utterly insane that we would even try this and we'll never arrest someone for filming police in public again."

I dont know if it did or not by why would they? I mean next time this happens I'm sure they will be betting that the person doesn't know their rights and just goes to jail quietly and gets suckered.... Means more money in fines

Quoting from the apeals court ruling: "The presense of probable cause is not even arguable here."

I wouldn't want to try arguing a similar arrest was legal when the court uses language like that in it's ruling.

The court didn't say that they didn't find the police officers arguements unconvincing, they more or less said get a clue.

The police were told that it did not matter what their boss told them, they were still guilty of violating Gilk's first amendment rights, and could be personally sued for it. Which should put a chill in law enforecement officers making those types of arrests.

I don't see that anywhere. Revocation of qualified immunity would be an immense boon to public liberty and would drop the hammer on bad cops, but his payout appears to be coming from the city of Boston, not from the officers themselves.

In the earlier appeal decision (a href="http://www.ca1.uscourts.gov/pdf.opinions/10-1764P-01A.pdf">pdf) on the motion to dismiss, page 24, the final two sentences are

For the reasons set forth above, we affirm the district court's order denying appellants' claim of qualified immunity.
So ordered.

The defendents are the city of Boston and the three officers involved. The city may have chosen to shoulder the costs, but several cities in the first circuit have specifically sent out warnings to thier police officers that they may be personally held liable for false arrests arising from public recording

Not sure what this guys occupation is, but 5 years later with $170,000 isn't much to show for it. That's $34,000 a year. It's also a payout for his legal fees. Net profit??? In fact, he could still be in negative when it's all said and done.

The guy is a family court lawyer. The settlement is $50,000 + lawyers fees (he was represented by the ACLU). The case is decisive in that Boston attempted to have the case dismissed base on limited immunity(i.e. can't sue police for doing their job). The trial court ruled against them (i..e. lawsuit can go ahead). The ruling was appealed and the appeal court handed down a ruling (pdf [uscourts.gov]) that left little doubt how the rest of the trial would go. The appeal court ruling said, in no uncertain terms, that the recording was legal, that it was not secret and Mr. Gliks rights were violated. Given that ruling on a motion to dismiss, there is no way the city would go ahead with a lower trial that would just confirm what the appeals court already said, so they settled.

If you mean "go the distance" as in set a precedent, then this case already did.

Early in the trial, the city attempted a motion to dismiss on the ground of limited immunity(i.e. can't sue police for doing thier job in good faith). The Citiy's argument was that the wiretap law says you "can't record in secret" and since it wasn't clear that the phone was recording audio, then the audio part of the recording was secret, and therefore the was probable cause for the arrest, and thus limited immunity applied. The appeals court handed down a decision(pdf [uscourts.gov]) in 2011 that drew on over 10 years of precedents that said in no uncertain terms that it wasn't a secret recording, that Mr Glik had the right to record police in public and that any resonable person would have known this. Therefore the police cannot claim llimited immunity.

Faced with such a strong appeals court ruling on the motion to dismiss, it was clear any trial would be lost by the City. So they settled.

The 2011 dismissal appeal decision is a precedent, and has already been used as binding precedent in 1st circut, and as non-binding precedent in all of the other circuits on similar cases. There is one case, I have misplaced the link, where the lawsuit is for an incident that happened before the 2011 glik decision and the police are claiming that since the incident happened before the glik decision, they couldn't know that it was a civil rights violation to arrest someone for this. As far as I can tell, they aren't getting anywhere with that argument. The language of the glik decision makes it clear that it has always been a civil rights violation to arrest someone for openly recording the police in a public space.

Glik did not ask to be arrested, but he was. He asked the IAD to investigate, they told him to fuck off and file a civil suit. So he did. And by winning it and costing them $170,000 the Boston police department did what they should have done in the first fucking place - the disciplined the officers involved.

Maybe the tax payers should pay more attention in the future to their local cops.

I don't think the parent poster was lamenting the fact that the guy got a big payout, but that this ended up with a cash settlement instead of being played out to the end to set a legal precedent. Even if he ended up getting $170K (or more) in the end, at least it would have set a legal precedent that should make this kind of thing less likely in the future.

Boston has paid out nothing; Boston tax payers have paid out. There is no downside to law enforcement breaking the law, as they simply fall back on the (apparently) bottomless pockets of the general population. It's unlikely those involved will receive so much as a reprimand, let alone be fired. Even when officers are fired, they simply get re-employed as another location. It's a lose-lose situation for everyone but the officers.

One thing that I don't get from the article is if the suit against the officers has also been settled. The appeals court said they had no reason to suspect their actions were legal, no matter what their bosses told them, and could therefore be personally sued.

You didn't read the story then (duh). The court tossed qualified immunity for the officers. Glik sued both the city and officers in question and in theory the city could force the cops to split the tab with them (I doubt they will). This should send a big chill through the nations police force as it's now precedent that they can lose immunity for false arrest. That's a HUGE precedent and exposes officers violating peoples rights to civil suits that take them for everything they are worth. Now an officer has to make the choice to falsely arrest someone with the understanding that they could end up in civil court and ordered to pay that person a bunch of money for violating their rights.

this also happened in Mass around 2001 or 2002, where someone was getting harassed and decided to record the procedure. He was a musician and had a recorder of some sort in his car. After all the grief that he took, he brought the tape to internal affairs to have the offending officers reprimanded, and they used the tape against him in a wiretapping case. Now he has been harassed and arrested. WINNING

If anything, I expect a larger outrage here about the rights than you would get in most news circles. The average person doesn't care about the rights issue because it's happening to "someone else", whereas the settlements (and the money to fund it) is coming from them the taxpayer and does have an effect on them personally (if it changes tax rates or effects funding on things the other individual cares about). Plus there's the whole "he got money for nothing" angle which is more a jealously thing.

No, it's not more about tax money than a man's rights. It's more about a non-punishment of paying a settlement out of tax payer money instead of some kind of repercussions against those who violated a man's rights. For the most part, the government doesn't pay for their abuse when the repercussion for a crime is handing out "free" money and hoping the other party shuts up about rights violations... you pay for this and the abuse goes on.

Maybe because the violation of his rights is plain as day, while the slap on the wrist that really only hurts the public is a little bit more subtle.

A while back, there was a school that was fined for giving students laptops with webcams and spying on the students at home. My initial reaction was "Good!" until I read the comments, and it was similiarly pointed out that it was taxpayer money being awarded, not really punishing the school officials who made the idiotic decision to invade privacy.

They're related. If public servants can abuse members of the public and then pass the responsibility for restitution on to other members of the public, then they have no incentive to stop. If the fine were paid by the officers in question, then it would be a different matter.

I find it rather suspicious the 4 misdemeanours weren't named in that article wheras the dropped felony was. Use of ellipsis in quotes also raises alarm bells. I suspect there's a bit more to that than the articles are saying.

It's not that the cops are slow to learn. It's that the lesson they're being taught is they can do whatever the fuck they want, and the worst possible outcome for them is a paid vacation. The most likely outcome is they get away with it clean and their victim is punished. You want the cops to sit up and take notice? Judges need to start having them taken out back of the courtroom and summarily executed for pulling this shit. Won't happen, because most judges (and juries) are on the side of the cops no

So until, the police and Internal Affairs get caught breaking the law, the law on the books isn't actually followed by the exact people who should know the law?
Vigilante justice from within the police system is not a good culture to have brewing.
Shouldn't anyone within the policing system that breaks the law or supports breaking the law be fired?
Seems to be a conflict of interest to me.

They acted in a way they believed the law specified. It took 5 years of lawyers and judges wrangling for it to be conclusively decided that the law didn't specify that and the arrest was wrongful.

If it took people who have been studying law most of their lives that long to decide, what chance does a police officer, with a comparatively small legal knowledge and a few minutes under pressure to make his mind up, have to get to the right decision? It would be more than a bit harsh to brand cops criminals wh

Oh god, please. Compare to this case in Baltimore from just last month: BPD is hauled into court by the ACLU for routinely arresting people when they video police, under wiretapping statutes. Three days before the court hearing, BPD announces that they concede that people shouldn't be arrested for photography -- but within the same day, BPD are still arresting people taking video: except the charge has now magically changed to loitering.

The police departments are very consciously corrupting the law to benefit themselves, doing everything they can to delay and obstruct justice, and prosecutors are helping them along. If they get definitively slapped down in court for one thing, then within 24 hours they come up with brand-new bogus legal readings and go on with their abusive behavior unchanged. This is not remotely a "decision beyond their capability" one-time accident.

It took five years because the party that was guilty of violating citizen's rights was stubbornly insisting that they "didn't do anything wrong", and then later on that they "didn't know it was wrong", and the court was forced to not only find whether there is any truth to their claims, but whether it can even serve as a plausible excuse - i.e. whether they could have reasonably not understood their obligations under the 1st Amendment. And the court, basically, ruled that they did not, and that the right that was infringed was clear and unambiguous. From the ruling [uscourts.gov]:

In summary, though not unqualified, a citizen's right to film government officials, including law enforcement officers, in the discharge of their duties in a public space is a basic, vital, and well-established liberty safeguarded by the First Amendment. Accordingly, we hold that the district court did not err in denying qualified immunity to the appellants on Glik's First Amendment claim.

(I recommend you actually read the full text of the ruling - it's not all that long, and the arguments are surprisingly clear and easy to follow)

I would think that with enough precedents against them and enough six figure settlements, any city would catch on pretty quickly that they need to fire such law-breaking cops. Hell, if another cop pulls this shit in Boston, you can bet the suit won't be for $100,000, but for a ton more because the city is showing signs of being a "habitual offender".

So, now that if could be worth almost $120K to be arrested for recording police in action, I wouldn't be surprised if the next big craze (or How to Make Money scheme) will be to look for & start recording any police action (from the common ticketing of a motorist to questioning witnesses or suspects near the scene of an incident, etc.)

It's perhaps like a lottery... some officers will be either unaware of the final outcome of the Glik story or perhaps simply lose their cool in the heat of the moment.

I can't believe this was ever an issue. Recording events as they happen, whether it's with a video, audio, or the old-fashioned pen-and-paper method, is a protected right under the first amendment of both the U.S. and most State Constitutions.

I guess the beginning is for the brave, but if everybody just takes photos non stop... eventually the police will be decentitized. Everybody knows that there are cameras everywhere noways so much like open source... a million eyes will eventually weed out the bugs in the system. We are living in times of change.

For 5 years of hassle to a citizen's effort to keep the government honest? I think it's a bargain compared to the payments we give out to politicians. Compare this to the millions that CEOs receive? A rounding error. This number is too small, not too large.

ridiculous for falsely arresting someone, then dragging it through the courts for years? Anyway, it says it paid damages AND legal fees. What do you want to bet that 5 years of legal fees are about $160,000? The city got of easy.

I agree it sucks that taxpayers pick up the tab but I doubt there's a legal way to get at retirement funds. The alternative is they don't pay at all. I don't think that's fair either. If the cops had falsely arrested this guy and the city said "whoa! that's just wrong, you're fired" then maybe it would have been enough.
Those taxpaying citizens should be more concerned with false arrest by the people they are paying to enforce the law and by a city government that pisses away money for 5 years defending that action. Maybe some of them will be mad enough at the waste of money to vote out the retards that are in office.

To your priest example, it's completely fair that the congregation that stood by oblivious while some priest molested children for years pays for that. I just find it hard to accept that hundreds, maybe thousands of people were members of these churches and not once did someone notice or have the balls to say "About Father Bob..." It's ludicrous that someone can get away with this stuff for decades. I guarantee that any congregation that's paid out because of molestation is a hell of a lot more careful about who is in the clergy and what they are doing, especially where kids are involved. Sometimes messing with peoples money is the only way to get a change.

So government employees do something wrong and the court punishes the taxpayers? How about paying that $160k out of the cops retirement fund?

This is like when a Priest gets caught molesting a kid and the Church pays the victim with the congregations money.

The cops were working for the city. They authority they abused was derived from the city. The city -- and thus the citizenry -- is responsible for their actions.

Now if the city thinks that it is not at fault for the actions of these employees -- that it wasn't bad management or poor training, etc., but rather something completely out of their control -- then perhaps the city should sue the officers to recover the money.

At any rate, it is important for all employers -- cities, churches, banks, etc. -- to ensure that they hire, manage, and train the employees acting in their name to obey all relevant laws and regulations in the course of their duties. To do any less is to expose the organization to unnecessary liability. This is especially important if you issue the aforementioned employees badges, guns, foreclosure forms, or the ability to invoke eternal damnation.

Yeah public apology and implementation of more stringent training would have been better, but 170k is pretty good as punitive fine and sets a precedent for future lawsuits. It doesn't say if the department intends to dock the officers' salaries to offset the cost (I hope so).

Not ridiculous. He was arrested, then spent years in court trying to get the police to do the right thing. What should he have done instead? Stopped when the time he invested became ridiculous? Then they would never change their behavior, and our rights would be even worse off than they are.

In order to change anything, it has to be enough for the offender to sit up and take notice. Now if only the officers in question were liable for 1% of the settlement, we would make some real progress.

You're absolutely right. The correct thing to do in this case is to try the officers in question for kidnapping, and their superiors AND the IAD for being an accessory to kidnapping. Making settlement payouts from the general fund does nothing to deter future crimes on the part of these thugs.